Homeward Bound

I remember, when I was younger, watching the movie Homeward Bound, and wondering how good a dog’s sense of direction was in real life.

At least in the case of Gemelli, I can now say: problematically good.

Gem not only remembers where things are, he also has strong ideas about when we should visit them. When he comes with me to work, for example, he always drags me to the pet store, many blocks away, even if it’s been months since his last visit. He knows where all the pet stores are in our home neighborhood, too, as well as all the TD Banks (where he can find water and free biscuits), and not a walk goes by that he doesn’t try to take us to a least a couple of those stops.

A few months ago, my younger brother got a cockapoo, a little girl named Brooklyn. Gem loves Brooklyn. Not in a ‘where the ladies at?’ kind of way (his other focus on walks), but in a platonic, member of the same pack, besties-for-life way. The two of them will wrestle and play for hours on end. Fortunately, and unfortunately, Brooklyn lives just ten blocks from our house. So on any afternoon or evening walk, Gem now also tries to drag us down to see her. And, a few times a week, we let him.

Last night, Jess and I had dinner at a restaurant near Columbus Circle. We brought Gem along, and ate at an outdoor table. Post-dinner, we walked into Central park.

So far as I know, I don’t think Gem had ever been to Columbus Circle before, nor to that corner of the park. But, even in the relative darkness, he looked around, and then started pulling us northward. A few blocks up, he veered out of the park, and onto Central Park West.

“He’s trying to take us to Brooklyn’s house,” I told Jess.

“I don’t think so,” she replied. “That’s still twenty blocks away, and he has no idea where he is; he thinks this is near our house.”

But, in fact, Gem knew precisely where he was. And he was on a mission. Up CPW, then across some street in the mid–70’s, and up Columbus. When we were two or three blocks away, Jess conceded. A few minutes later, triumphantly, Gem dragged us in my brother’s building’s front door.

Sure, those excellent navigation skills are at times a pain in the ass. But they’re also kind of a comfort. As Jess has a terrible sense of direction, it’s nice to think that, so long as she’s walking Gem, the two together are likely to find their way home.

|   

Snow Shoes

For the first year and a half of Gemelli’s life, when it snowed, we were stuck inside. I’d take him downstairs, and he’d gamely head off towards the corner. But after a few steps, the combination of ice and salt would leave him pinned in place, holding up a frozen, burning paw while looking at me accusatorially.

A few weeks ago, we discovered [Pawz](http://pawzdogboots.com). Unlike the more structured boots we’d tried before – which Gem removed as quickly as we’d put them on – he at least tolerated the Pawz. And with his feet covered, he didn’t mind the weather. Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night stayed us from completion of our appointed rounds.

This morning, as after the last few big storms, we headed to Riverside Park. On the surface streets, the combination of shoveling, snowplowing, subterranean pipes and foot and road traffic prevented snow from really accumulating. But down in Riverside, eight inches of snowfall yielded eight inches of snow piled on the ground. Which, if you’re a foot tall, is basically shoulder height.

So, today, Gem took about an hour to slog through a half-mile loop of park we can normally clear in a matter of minutes. Undeterred by the difficulty, he trudged happily along, marking trees and garbage cans, and trying to put the moves on the female dogs also out for a stroll.

Unfortunately, most of those hot ladies were much taller than he was today, and it appears “neck deep” is a relative measure. So while he’d run furiously to reach them, just a few of their steps would leave them out of butt-sniffable reach. Apparently, even across species lines, short guys have to work that much harder to kill in on the dating scene.

|  

Treat, Trick

Gemelli will happily eat pretty much any kind of protein. But as you stray from Paleo choices, he starts to get pickier. Most baked dog treats, for example, don’t pass muster.

That isn’t an issue in our own house, where we now only buy the kinds of meaty treats we know he’ll like. But it’s often a source of some embarrassment in the outside world.

In New York City, you can take a small dog with you into nearly any store. Doing field research for [Dobbin](http://www.dobbinclothing.com), for example, we drag Gem into a good number of clothing boutiques, where he’s invariably a hit with the women behind the counter.

Your dog is adorable!, they say. Those little white boots!

Can I give him a treat?, they ask.

Sure, I tell them. You can try.

The shop girl will come out, biscuit in hand. Gem will sit politely, smile, take the treat in his mouth. Then, after a couple of seconds, all the while making eye contact with her, he’ll disgustedly spit the treat onto the floor, turn around and walk off.

Total asshole move.

*[Ed. note. Forgot to mention this coup de grace: because it’s apparently too easy to clean up a rejected whole treat, he’ll also occasionally crack the treat in his mouth first, before dumping it as a little mound of crushed biscuit on the ground. Nice.]*

|  

Year of the Dog

We didn’t have dogs growing up, so I didn’t really know what I was getting myself into when we adopted Gem. On balance, that seems like the best – or perhaps only – way to have made what turns out to be such a big life choice.

H.L. Mencken once said, “if I ever marry it will be on a sudden impulse, as a man shoots himself.” And though I wouldn’t compare marriage to suicide (at least most days), I do agree it’s a pretty rash, uninformed choice. Because, really, when you’re popping the question, what do you know about what married life is like?

Getting a dog (like, I assume, having a kid) is even crazier. You don’t really get to audition people for the role. There’s no trial period. Instead, this little thing shows up and it’s yours and there’s no going back. Worse, some of those little things grow up to be much nicer dogs (or people) than others, and you have no idea what yours is going to be.

In light of that, we couldn’t have been luckier with Gemelli. He truly is a wonderful puppy. Smart and curious, playful and funny, he’s a happy, confident, friendly guy. He’s just stubborn enough to be related to Jess; regardless of her schedule, Gem somehow manages to drag her every afternoon to Central Park, where he makes her lift him up to watch the ducks in the reservoir. And from the early days when he figured out how to unlatch his own crate, and let himself out to wreak secret midnight havoc, I knew he was enough of a troublemaker to be related to me.

By now, each day starts with a paw to the face (GET UP! GET UP! IT’S TIME TO GO TO THE DOG RUN!!!), ends with twelve and a half furry pounds sprawled across our legs at the bottom of the bed, and I can no longer imagine it any other way.

So happy first birthday Gem, we love you. Here’s to many more years together, though ideally with less pooping inside the house.

|  

Size of Dog, Size of Fight

If people look like their dogs, Gemelli was apparently the right choice, as several people have commented that we do somehow look similar.

But as much as we apparently resemble each other physically, it’s in personality that we even more closely overlap. Like me, he’s laid back, overly friendly, and curious enough to get himself into trouble.

And it seems we’re similar in at least one more way. This morning at the dog run, we walked in just in time to see the three largest dogs there – a husky, a flat-coated retriever and a pit bull – neck-deep in a royal rumble in the dead center of the run. As soon as I let Gem off the leash, he immediately took off for the three of them, jumping straight into the middle of the fray.

“Is that little dog yours?” asked the owner of the retriever.

Yes, I told her.

“And he’s how big?”

About twelve pounds.

“Well,” she said, “he definitely has an outsized sense of self-confidence.”

My dog, indeed.

|   

The Devil Inside

Gemelli had terrible gas last night. Terrible. So when he started making meaningful eye contact with me and Jess, we knew what he wanted.

I put a coat and shoes on me, a leash on him, and we both headed downstairs. My plan was to have him poop quickly on a lap around the block, then head back in from the cold; Gem had other ideas.

After fighting it out at the corner for a few minutes – I wanted him to turn up West End Ave., he apparently wasn’t interested – I gave up and told him I’d just follow him.

So he ran across West End, dragging me towards Riverside Drive. I was pretty sure where he wanted to go: the [87th St dog run](http://www.yelp.com/biz/87th-street-dog-run-new-york) in Riverside Park, one of his favorite morning walk stomping grounds.

“I know you like the dog run,” I tried to tell to him, as he pulled me down 88th street, “but your friends won’t be there right now. They’re all at home. Nobody comes to the dog run at 10:30 at night.”

We reached the park, dark and empty, and headed down the winding path and long stairs to the run. As suspected, it was completely deserted.

Still, we went in, and I let Gemelli off leash. He sat down for a minute. Then he took off running, full speed, around the perimeter of the run, howling to the moon at the top of his lungs.

He’s normally a pretty quiet guy – doesn’t even bark all that much – so I wasn’t aware he *could* howl. But howl he did, lap after sprinted lap.

At the end of his fifth or sixth pass, he ran to the dead center of the run, popped a squat, and made the biggest poop of his life.

Finished, he shook himself off, quietly walked over to me. I put his leash back on, and, in the dark, we silently and calmly walked back home.

|   

Lie with Dogs

When we first got Gemelli, he slept in his crate, next to our bed. His bladder still small, he’d wake up every few hours, needing to pee. So I’d carry him down the hall to the kitchen, let him unleash on the wee wee pads we’d laid out in the corner, then carry him back to his crate where he’d promptly pass out.

As he grew, the time between pee excursions extended. Soon, he could hold it all the way from bedtime to six in the morning. On the plus side, that meant I could sleep many more hours interrupted; on the negative, it also meant that his single nighttime pee excursion took place when the sun had already started to come up. So Gem wouldn’t go back to sleep. Instead, he’d cry pitifully and bang the side of the crate until Jess would kick me out of bed, and he and I would head to the living room to half-heartedly play very sleepy games of fetch.

One morning, out of frustration, I came back from his 6:00am pee excursion, and put Gem on our bed, instead of back in his crate. And he rejoiced. He ran a small circle on the covers, licked Jess’ sleeping face a few times to make sure she was alive, and then happily conked out at the foot of the bed.

So a new ritual was born. Each night, Gemelli would sleep in the crate until sunrise or so, then in our bed for the next hour or two.

A few weeks back, however, after we’d dragged him out for a long and particularly stressful day, we let Gem sleep the whole night up with us. Which, in short, was the beginning of the end. He made it back crate-side perhaps twice over the next week, and then has been sleeping with us ever since.

Like in a new relationship, it was initially tough to sleep while sharing a bed. We kicked him onto the floor one night by mistake, then spent the next few nights uncomfortably curled in balls to avoid doing it again. Each time one of us moved, it would set of a chain reaction waking up all three of us.

But, eventually, we got in our groove. Gem has found his primary spots: at the foot of the bed between the two of us, or up at the top of the bed, burrowed in a little cave between our pillows and the headboard.

At 6:30am on the dot every morning, he comes over and starts cleaning my face and hair. Not yet, I tell him. Still time to sleep.

Then, at 7:00am, he comes over and starts chewing on my hands, trying to tug me upright. Still not time to wake up, I say. Thirty more minutes.

And then, at 7:30am, and I mean exactly at 7:30am, he’s back and standing over me, ready to go out. And this time, he means business. If I ignore him for more than a minute or so, he starts to repeatedly punch me in the head until I get up, put both of our jackets on, and take him out.

I resolve each year that I’m going to start waking up earlier, and this year, for the first time in memory, that resolution has stuck for more than a week. If nothing else, Gem’s the best alarm clock I’ve ever owned.

|   

Munchausen by Canis Proxy

Here’s an easy recipe for becoming a hypochondriac: start as a physician’s child, to absorb medical knowledge by osmosis. Get an undergraduate degree in something like neuroscience, so you have just enough academic health knowledge to be dangerous. Factor in general neuroticism and a vivid imagination. And then, through years working in tech, get extremely good at Googling up obscure yet painfully fatal diseases that all begin with innocuous flu-like symptoms. (A few weeks after I’ve helped clean out a dusty storage closet, I’m certain that a mild headache is an early symptom of Hantavirus.)

But if I’m good, Jess is even better. Because not only is she able to convince herself, she can often convince me, too. A few years back, for example, while I was out in Los Angeles for work, Jess decided that her stiff neck was actually the onset of meningococcal meningitis. I spent much of the afternoon responding to her worried calls and texts from New York, to say that, no, I was pretty sure she didn’t have meningitis. But I spent most of the night staring at the ceiling above my hotel bed, trying to think of how I would explain to family and friends that I had poopooed Jess’ concerns the very day before she died in her sleep.

(Spoiler: Jess is still very much alive. Though she did discover that spending hours on a couch with your laptop, head propped up sharply on a stack of pillows, is a pretty reliable route to a sore neck.)

Impressive, I know. But if you think that’s good, you should see what we can do with our powers combined, and focused on a six-pound puppy.

Of course, Gem has actually been totally healthy. But that doesn’t stop us, at least a few times a week, from Googling up crazy strings like “puppy choking sounds sleeping”. If he walks by his water bowl one time too many without drinking, we’re just a couple of clicks away from diagnosis: OH NO HE’S GOT PARVOVIRUS AND HOLY CRAP MORTALITY RATE FROM THAT AS A PUPPY IS LIKE 90%!! Gemelli, we barely even knew you!

As a result, we’ve basically been helicopter-parenting this poor dog: putting his favorite fleece blanket on him when we find him asleep on the floor; cutting his high-end food into smaller, bite-sized pieces. All the ridiculous and overbearing behaviors I’ve long mocked in New York dog owners.

I’ve been joking for a while that Gem is a pretty good pre-child warmup lap. Perhaps that’s true. But if nothing else, he’s a good chance for us to tone down our overprotective mania. Because if we don’t, I fear our future children will be in for the life of therapy bills inevitably caused by having to wear helmets and water-wings whenever they leave the house.

|   

Gone to the Dogs

Though I’ve subscribed to the Paleo Diet in theory for nearly a decade, in practice, my adherence during that time has been 80/20 at best. At the end of the day, while I’m sure that pasta is slowly killing me, I’m even more sure it’s absolutely delicious.

Gemelli, however, is a Paleo zealot. We’ve tried to give him dog biscuits, gourmet canine cookies, and any of the other treats he’s supposed to like, all of which he barely chews before spitting out. Instead, his favorite snack at the moment is freeze-dried beef liver, followed closely by salmon jerky. Last week, as I was making stuffing for Thanksgiving, he snuck off with several just-washed carrots and celery stalks, which he gleefully devoured while hiding under a side table, as if both were so delicious they had to be forbidden.

Similarly, Gem won’t eat any grain-based kibble, so we’ve instead been feeding him Orijen and Stella & Chewy, two essentially Paleo dog foods. Reading through the ingredient lists on both, I realized he eats better than we do: Orijen, for example, is comprised of wild salmon and trout, free-range poulty and eggs, grass-fed beef, bison and lamb, and organic vegetables.

And despite that, his food costs us mere dollars a day. I considered switching Jess and me to the stuff, until I realized that his calorie consumption was probably a bit less than ours, given his six pound bodyweight. Working backwards from our relative sizes, the cost savings stopped looking so good.

Which is probably just as well. I tried one of those Orijen kibbles, and was reminded by its taste that the only thing Mel loves better than Paleo foods is the smell of other dogs’ butts.

|   

Gemelli

Welcome home to Gemelli “Mel” Newman, nine weeks old, and ready to rumble:

|